We talk about computational linguisticswith Michael White, an associate professor at Ohio State University and one of the creators of the Madly Ambiguous linguistic game.

Here are some questions on our list to discuss:

How do machines “understand” language?

How can they handle ellipses, anaphoras, and other weird Greek wordsambiguous linguistic constructs?

Is non-verbal communication a “computable” language, too?

Can machines come up with their own language?

We translators are usually ambivalent towards the progress computational linguistics has made over the last years. On the one hand, it makes our work, well, handier. On the other hand, we all saw The Terminator.